What Is Design?

de·sign [dih-zahyn]

to plan and fashion the form and structure of an object, work of art, decorative scheme, etc.

Some of the keywords that stand out in this definition are “plan,” “form,” and “structure.” How does one “plan”? How does one implement “form” and “structure” in their product? What sort of process does one go through to ensure that his or her design will succeed?

My name is Austin Joseph Darigo, and I am a dual major graduating in December 2012 from the Pennsylvania State University. One of my degrees will be in Mechanical Engineering. There are several core courses in the engineering curriculum that go through different steps of design. Some books and professors rearrange the rename the order of the steps, but all of them have the same basic universal interpretation. Through my experiences, I have organized the process of design in a five-step process:

1. Analyze

2. Brainstorm

3. Develop

4. Test

5. Improve

The steps are relatively simple and I will give a very brief breakdown to them:

1. Analyze: The first thing to do in any sort of project is to understand what you are designing. What is the purpose of your product? What are the specifications the customers need, and what sort of engineering specifications does the project need to succeed? Are there any constraints on the project, and how will that affect the outcome? These are questions the team need to breakdown and analyze before proceeding on how to build the project.

2. Brainstorm: Now that the team understands what they need to build, they need to come with a way on how to build it. What sort of ideas can each group member contribute to the final design? How will this product look? Where does the user interface or inputs go, and how will it look? Where will the gears, motor, battery, or whatever is included in the design be placed? The group brainstorms ideas now that they know and understand the scope of the project.

3. Develop: This is the hand-on step of the design process. Now that the team has blueprints to work from for the project, they need to set on physical construction or simulation. This is where the alpha prototypes are designed; the result is not, by any means, the final product nor would it use all the same materials used in the final product, but it is supposed to be a representation to see if those core ideas and brainstorming will work and which direction the team may need to go towards. Once the group can develop a model for their design, they can proceed to the next steep to see what works and does not work on their design.

4. Test: The team has an alpha prototype and it is time to see if this design is suitable. Will it be able to satisfy the customer needs? Do all the parts fit together? Now that you undergo some normal tests, is any of the subsystems within the product failing or undergoing unnecessary stress from something unseen in the brainstorming step? Here is where the team can test their prototype and identify any problems that arise.

5. Improve: During this final step, the team address the problems from the test phase and goes about fixing it. The beta prototype is developed from the improvements from the alpha prototype; the difference between these two prototypes is that although the beta prototype is not ready for production, it should be a functional version of the final product. Does the design need to be changed? Are all the customer specifications met with the beta prototype? The last three steps (Develop, Test, Improve) are sometimes repeated several times; maybe the design needs to be changed and the group goes back to the development stage to create a new prototype to test and then improve on. This test continues until the final product is completed.

The process is simple, but coming up with an innovation, simple, and operational design is always challenging. In my experiences, I have designed a portable shopping cart, a building-integrated wind turbine, a semi-automatic jar opener, and a pneumatic tube museum display, among other small classroom projects. With each of these products, I have used the same design process to achieve a successful final product.

However, I want to revisit the definition of design from before and highlight a phrase used: “ a work of art.” While engineering projects are also aimed to be aesthetically pleasing, I also want to mention my dual major. As I said before, I am getting a bachelor’s degree of science in Mechanical Engineering; I am also obtaining a bachelor’s degree of art in Film/Video. Studying in these two different fields may seem like an unusual combination, but the creativity and design approach used in my film courses have enhanced and given me a new outlook in doing my engineering projects. This combination has trained me to be open-minded and has allowed my work to be both thorough and complete (as an engineer would approach any project) as well as aesthetic, creative, and distinctive.

Film and Engineering are not as different as they seem. I started with comparing the design process with engineering because many people associate design with engineering and architecture. The definition of design does not just pertain to engineering – as Dictionary.com states, design is also a “work of art.” You can apply the same process I just defined to film; a screenwriter will analyze a certain theme or message they are trying to say, then brainstorm how to tell a story that conveys that theme. A director and/or producer will then develop a storyboard and go about shooting the film. An editor gets the footage in postproduction and tries to improve on the scenes with color correction, noise correction, special effects, and other editing techniques. The director may need to reshoot scenes, but ultimately, the production team sets about a certain process to design a product (in this case, a film) for an audience. The products are different from engineering, yes, but the process is the same.

Engineering design is taken to apply to the design of products, processes, systems and services. All of these have users and or customers. A film is designed like any product and delivered like any service to the customers. And it is embedded in many systems just like any other design. And many engineers have very exciting careers in "entertainment engineering." Design in art, however, also means design as expression. The best films usually embrace expression as the the most important X in design for X, where the creativity so valued in engineering design is taken beyond the economic context to the world of art. The economic return on the investment valued in consumer product design may be overshadowed by the aesthetic return. There may be no clear boundary between the two in a given work of art, but in theory they are literally worlds apart.

In this portfolio, I will go through each of my previous projects, both film and engineering, and apply the design process and my experiences with them. By the end of this portfolio, I hope you are able to appreciate the similarities of film and engineering that you may have seen before.

Sincerely,

Austin J. Darigo